


Lure

by lazaefair



Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Assassination, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossdressing, M/M, Period-Typical Racism, Pre-Canon, Undercover, Undercover as a Couple, xena levels of historical accuracy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-26
Updated: 2018-12-26
Packaged: 2019-09-28 01:00:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17172854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lazaefair/pseuds/lazaefair
Summary: Goody stays appropriately gobsmacked all the way back into town. He rouses himself only once on the ride to ask, “Are you really gonna—”“Yes,” Billy cuts him off. “It won’t be the first time, either,” he adds, and relishes the stunned silence for the rest of the way to their inn, even if it does make the journey a little more boring.Written solely because I thirst for beautiful men wearing Victorian ball gowns.





	Lure

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lemur710](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lemur710/gifts).



They manage _not_ to ruin the work of several hours with a vigorous fuck before the hotel concierge knocks on the door to inform them their hired carriage is waiting. But it’s a damn near thing.

*

It all begins when the client meets them in the flowering burgh of San Jose, California (Goody’s words), receiving them in her airy, bountiful, and gracious abode (also Goody’s words). Billy likes that her home is full of light. He likes her tea even more, real gunpowder green, brewed proper. But he likes the sum of money she offers as payment even more than that.

Which doesn’t stop him from leaning back in his chair, gaze impassive, to declare that there’s no way he’ll do the job for less than twice that amount.

“Sonny boy, I used to stare fucking Triad bosses down when I was fucking them over in the high courts of San Francisco. You need a better evil-eye than that to impress _me,”_ she says, but there’s a twinkle in the black depths of her still-lively eyes, and the corners of Billy’s mouth twitch up in response. He might like her best of all.

Feels good to be the one doing the talking. As much as Goody’s white skin and silver tongue make Billy’s life easier, it’s good to be the one on even footing with the client for once, the one she looks to first while Goody sits silent and ignored beside him. It puts him in a generous mood, and he settles earlier than he might’ve otherwise. Twenty-five percent increase from her initial offer, plus incurred expenses. Half paid up front and half paid upon completion. It’s still a sum that makes Goody’s eyebrows rise and Billy have to suppress the same reaction. A job like this’ll set them pretty for half a year or more.

“Pleasure doing business with you, Madame Ah,” he says in his broken Cantonese as they stand to shake hands on the deal, which makes her smile, and then it’s her turn to raise her eyebrows when he borrows a trick from Goody and bows to kiss the back of her hand. 

“I see why you’re so jealous for his attention,” she says to Goody, the first thing she’s addressed direct to him all morning, but she turns back to Billy while Goody’s still stammering out a reply. 

“You’ll need all that charm to pull this off, sonny boy, more than those fancy knives of yours. But I like you,” she says, with a scorching look through her lashes and a slow caress of his jaw that lingers in the hollow under his ear. And now Billy really feels for the first time the magnetism, the self-possession, the uncompromising spirit that once made her the most powerful Chinese woman in San Francisco. “Come back here when you’re done and maybe you’ll get a little something more with the second half of your reward, hm? You can invite Mr. Robicheaux along, if you want.”

“I don’t make promises before a job is done,” Billy says, keeping his voice steady with effort.

“A wise boy, too.” Ah Toy nods as if to herself. “You’ll do fine. Now come. We have measurements to take, dresses to buy, and a man to kill. Time’s wasting.”

*

Goody stays appropriately gobsmacked all the way back into town. He rouses himself only once on the ride to ask, “Are you really gonna—”

“Yes,” Billy cuts him off. “It won’t be the first time, either,” he adds, and relishes the stunned silence for the rest of the way to their inn, even if it does make the journey a little more boring.

*

“I’m sorry,” Billy says. They’re alone in their room. He shucks his boots off and stretches out on one of the beds with a sigh.

“Whatever on earth for?”

“Going to use your name and reputation in our cover story to draw the target out. You might have to play the role for a week, maybe more.”

“Chéri,” Goody says, drawing near and laying his hand on Billy’s cheek. His eyes shine so blue in the dusty afternoon sunlight. “Anything I have that might be of the slightest of use to you, you can use, and welcome to it. Anything. I mean it.”

“I know,” Billy breathes out. He closes his eyes and turns his head to kiss Goody’s palm, and for the next hour neither of them say many more words at all.

*

“What about Northern Pacific?” Goody asks a few days later, elbow-deep in the fourth enormous parcel to arrive that morning.

Billy emerges from behind a cloud of petticoats. “What about them?”

“This far north - in a proper city with proper law enforcement? You ain’t even a little bit concerned?”

“Nah,” Billy flicks his fingers and goes back to sorting towering stacks of underclothes. “They are still looking for a dangerous Chinaman, desperate, on the run. Not a ravishing Korean-Hawaiian beauty with an incredible pineapple fortune, riding in openly.”

“Well, I s’pose when you put it like that.” Goody unearths a little gold pot, opens it to discover a deep crimson coralline salve, and starts to smirk. “Ravishing, you said?”

“Ravishing,” Billy confirms. “Now I need your help to make breasts.”

*

Pineapple heiresses ride first class, and first class means private compartments. They arrive before anyone else boards and leave after everyone else has disembarked, to minimize the risk of stray questions on how and why Goodnight Robicheaux leaves San Jose accompanied by a stone-faced male Oriental companion but arrives in San Francisco accompanied by a smiling female Oriental wife.

“If my mother could see me now,” Goody says wistfully as he offers his arm to Billy. “Her youngest, settling down after twenty-five years of wilful, mulish rebellion against the holy state of matrimony, at long last.”

Billy arches a painfully manicured eyebrow and flutters his fan, narrowly watching the travelers, loiterers and busybodies hanging around in the station. “Are you sure she wouldn’t drop dead of a heart attack as soon as she saw me?” he mutters out of the side of his mouth, pitching his voice up to a warm alto. 

“You say that like it’s a bad thing, ma belle.” Goody’s gold tooth gleams bright in the Californian sunshine as he grins. “But you wouldn’t even need to reveal what’s really under those silken skirts of yours before she’d take to her bed and have the entire household fussin’ and carryin’ on over her like she’s dying, which she would most certainly not be. You’d make my dear sister and her six broken engagements look like the most sedate of matrons. The talk of the entire blessed town for a year and a day, at _least.”_

“I think my mother would just slit our throats in our sleep,” Billy says thoughtfully. “Call us a cab. We need to start the gossip immediately.”

Goody beckons their porter over and tells him to flag down a cab with a wink and a few palmed coins. He turns to Billy while they wait on the sidewalk. “You tellin’ me your mother wouldn’t consider me the worthiest catch for her most beautiful daughter?” he asks in mock injury. “Sweetheart, I find that downright hurtful.”

Billy resists the urge to roll his eyes or whack Goody with the fan. “She would object to her eldest _son_ taking up with another man - a _white_ man - while dressed as a woman. Darling,” he adds for the benefit of the returning porter and the cabdriver, now busy loading their luggage.

“Whatever you say, my angel,” Goody says, pointedly offering his hand for Billy to take as he heaves himself and his forty pounds of skirts up the step and into the cab. For that, Billy waits until the door is safely shut and they’ve started moving to whack Goody with his fan. “Only the most gallant of gestures for you, ma biche, ma caille, ma chère,” Goody protests between whacks, guffawing fit to bust, and Billy considers it an auspicious sign that this job begins with raucous laughter as they roll away to the hotel.

*

“Goodnight Robicheaux, as I live and breathe,” booms across the restaurant, cutting through the chatter of San Francisco’s finest out for dinner and gossip. Mustachioed, well-fed, well-dressed, bearing down on them fast. Billy squeezes Goody’s hand under the table - an apology and offering of his strength at once as Goody shuts his eyes. 

“Well, if it ain’t Timothy Jack Hebert himself, you unrepentant rascal,” he says after a long moment, opening his eyes and pulling a hearty grin across his face before he turns to address the man. “Haven’t seen you in a month of Sundays, feels like. Don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure of introducing my lovely wife yet, but they say there’s no time like the present, don’t they?” 

Billy smiles demurely, lashes down, as Hebert finally notices him and promptly gapes wider than the ornamental carp in his old master’s garden.

And so it begins.

*

“Yes, I love America. Everything so...big here,” Billy simpers. Leaning into his broken accent, affecting a breathiness he finds intensely irritating - not the least because it’s only partially feigned. Fucking corsets. But it serves to further disguise his voice. 

And if it makes him come off as a frilly, empty-headed simpleton, well, being underestimated was the entire point of this exercise. 

“Aren’t you just the most darling thing,” one of the ladies simpers right back over the tea table, passing him a dry, crumbly biscuit. 

“Thank you very much, Mrs. Hebert.”

“Oh, you’re too much. You must call me Tabitha, dear. We’ll be such dear friends, I can just feel it.”

“Tab...tabi...Tabby?” Billy stutters carefully, wondering if he can demand a hazard bonus for successfully eating the biscuit without choking and dying before he can complete the job.

“Tabby!” Everyone claps their hands in delight, and Tabitha beams. “Well, I never. Of course you may call me Tabby. Simply too precious, isn’t she?”

“Are you coming to the gala on Saturday, Mrs. Robicheaux?” Mrs. Colton asks.

The gimlet-eyed Miss Abernathy leans forward. She’s stunningly beautiful, dressed extremely fashionably in blue silk, and clearly jealous as a fiend that Billy’s dominated the gossip mills since he sailed into town. “She’ll have arrived too late for an invitation, I should think. I have it on good authority they went out yesterday, in fact. It’s very exclusive,” she adds, arching her eyebrows.

Billy meets her gaze as blandly as he can. “What is a...gala?”

This provokes another round of exclamations.

“Fancy not knowing what a gala is!”

With a deep sigh (on the inside) he settles in for the long haul.

*

“A fundraising gala for the orphans of the city. How very charitable of him.”

“He’s an upright citizen of the people,” Billy quotes Mrs. Hebert, dramatic swoops and all, as Goody chuckles from the depths of the armchair by the bed. “The pillar of the community, my _word_. Beloved by everyone. Un-im- _peach_ -able virtue,” Billy draws the word out with a sneer as he pulls his gloves off and chucks them onto the vanity.

“Allow me.” Goody comes over and starts to unbutton the front of Billy’s bodice. “Ain’t a mystery why he’s been getting so brazen. Probably figures he could stand in the middle of Chinatown, strangle his next girl in broad daylight, and still not lose any votes.”

 _“And_ he was on the Vigilance Committee. Really looking forward to gutting that fucker the instant he lays a hand on me.”

“You know I love it when you come over all bloodthirsty, cher,” Goody says with a glint in his eye. He pushes the bodice off, then skims light fingers over Billy’s shoulders. Separated from skin only by the thin chemise, and Billy inhales sharp through his nose when the air between them turns heavy with intent, slow and easy as sweet syrup.

He parts his lips. Watches Goody’s eyes drop to his mouth, and smiles. “Get me out of this fucking corset. Now.”

“With the greatest of pleasure, cher.”

**Author's Note:**

> I am the reason why the fic reveal was delayed. I am very sorry. 
> 
> Inspired in no small measure by [In The Waiting Time](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9180514) by lisaroquin. That is some quality men-in-dresses writing right there.
> 
> Historical Victorian-era crossdressers: [Fanny and Stella](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/25/fanny-stella-neil-mckenna-review), two young English people who caused a massive sensation when they were arrested at the theater in full drag, flirting with the men, and using the women's restrooms. Absolutely fabulous.
> 
> [Ah Toy, Historical Hottie](https://historicalhottiesblog.com/2016/03/13/ah-toy/): real-life San Francisco madam who took the town by storm when she arrived in 1849(ish) and became the first female Chinese sex worker in the United States (that we know of). Tall, willowy, exotic - and pure 100% grade-A badass. A true problematic fave.


End file.
